A suburban man recently arrested on child pornography charges worked for years at a middle school even after he had been ordered to get sex offender treatment, a Tribune review of district and courtrecords shows.

The school district's hiring decision 12 years ago came to light after the Tinley Park man — now a former employee of the district — was charged in July with 12 counts of possessing child pornography. There is no indication the charges relate to his tenure at the district, which ended in 2008.

The man, Louis Ferguson, 38, has a 2002 criminal conviction that required he get sex offender treatment, yet he was hired by Homer Community Consolidated School District 33C six months after he was sentenced. Ferguson quit the Homer Glen district in 2008 after he was accused of some type of misconduct that the district said it must keep secret under Illinois law.

What records are available raise questions about just what authorities did to protect schoolchildren in past years. It's a case that also illustrates how Illinois law can be used to keep secrets that could help answer such questions.

The mother of Ferguson's 2002 victim said she couldn't understand how a school could hire Ferguson to work near children after he committed a crime that was "definitely of a sexual nature" with her then fifth-grade daughter.

"She was afraid for quite a while," said the mother, who is not being identified to protect the identity of her daughter. "I remember her waking up with bad dreams and being afraid to be home by herself."

While district officials told the Tribune they would not hire someone in 2014 with Ferguson's background, they have declined to explain how the district hired him in 2002. That includes refusing to release the results of a background check the district said it did and blacking out references Ferguson listed on his employment application.

Records show the Cook County court's Social Service Department knew Ferguson had taken a job with the school district and sought to have a judge ban him from working with kids. But the records don't spell out what, if anything, the court told the district and what happened to the recommendation that Ferguson lose his job working near kids.

Ferguson, through his attorney, declined to comment. He has pleaded not guilty to the pending charges. His court-appointed attorney indicated Ferguson may have a mental disability, court records show. Ferguson was being held on $150,000 bail.

In the January 2002 case, a preteen girl complained that Ferguson, then 25, groped her on the block in Tinley Park where Ferguson lived at the time with his parents.

In court records, Ferguson was quoted as saying he touched only the girl's shoulder during a game of tag.

Tinley Park police Chief Steve Neubauer told the Tribune his agency sought a felony charge but said it could have been difficult to convict based on the lack of outside witnesses and physical evidence.

Cook County prosecutors instead pursued a misdemeanor battery charge. Ferguson was found guilty about three months later and sentenced to court supervision.

But because it was a lower-level charge not specifically indicating sexual misconduct, Ferguson didn't need to register as a sex offender, an act that would have barred him from working in a school.

"In retrospect, would it have been great to get a conviction of a sex crime? Yeah," Neubauer said.

Counselors said Ferguson continued to maintain his innocence to the point that he couldn't successfully complete his sex offender treatment, records show.

Along the way, officials and counselors noted concerns in court files with Ferguson reporting his attempts to get work with kids — losing a job at a day care, applying for a job at a toy store and finally getting hired as a custodian at a Homer Glen middle school in October 2002.

Probation officers requested that a judge ban Ferguson from working with kids, but the court file does not indicate how the judge responded. Instead, court records show Ferguson's court-ordered oversight ended in September 2003 despite complaints from caseworkers that he hadn't successfully completed his sex offender treatment.

Sharon Hoffman, director of the Social Service Department, said state law prohibits her from releasing more records to clarify what happened.

What's clear is that Ferguson kept his job. Unclear is how exactly he got it. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the district provided the Tribune Ferguson's employment application but blacked out his past jobs and references. It didn't provide a copy of a background check it says it conducted.

Such a check, if it followed state protocol, should have alerted the district to a battery conviction, an Illinois State Board of Education spokeswoman said.

J. Michel Morrow, who was assistant superintendent when Ferguson was hired, said he was unaware of Ferguson's 2002 case and didn't remember a single background check that didn't come back clean.

"I'm not sure if we missed something or if the state missed something," said Morrow, who retired as superintendent this summer.

The school board president at the time, John Hylton, said he wasn't sure either except to assume Ferguson somehow got around the background check, noting "these are people that know how to game the system."

"It's like giving the keys to a candy store to a child," said Hylton, who left the board in 2003. "It's unfortunate he was able to get in."

John Lavelle, the district's assistant superintendent for business, was business manager in 2002 but said he could not discuss the results of a criminal records check or comment on employees, except to say the hiring of Ferguson "was done in accordance with Illinois law."

Asked to describe district hiring policies at the time, Lavelle responded: "The district is not interested in commenting further on this matter."

The district's records show it promoted Ferguson in early 2004 to head custodian at Hadley Middle School, and his pay doubled that year to about $40,000. By 2007 his pay was $55,000 a year. Then he quit the district in September 2008 by sending the superintendent a two-sentence letter saying he was resigning immediately for "personal reasons."

The district declined to say if he'd been disciplined before the resignation. In its formal response to the Tribune, the district did note it had two documents that it described as "disciplinary" but said it didn't have to turn them over for various reasons, including that the law required disciplinary records of public employees to be destroyed after four years. The Tribune is appealing that action with the attorney general.

Records and interviews show that after Ferguson quit his job at the district, he became director of housekeeping at a nursing home while moonlighting as a pizza delivery driver. Fred Frankel, an attorney for Concord Nursing and Rehab in Oak Lawn, said the state police reported not finding any convictions for Ferguson.

Tinley Park police have declined to release details of their latest arrest of Ferguson. Court records show he's accused of having "numerous digital images" of children having sex with adults. The records do not specify how Ferguson was alleged to have obtained the images.

Neubauer said police "seized volumes of media" and the investigator "is still going through the material." No local connections have been found.

But in the latest case, the judge was explicit on the rules for Ferguson if he is released on bail: No contact with anyone under 18.

A Kankakee woman who missed a scheduled appointment for alcoholism treatment in Orland Park was charged with DUI after police found her passed out in the clinic parking lot, according to a recently released Orland Park police report.

A 21-year-old Oak Lawn woman was charged Tuesday night with reckless homicide and several other violations stemming from a fatal hit-and-run accident that occurred shortly after midnight Saturday in the 19100 block of Oak Park Avenue, after a Jason Aldean concert at the Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre...